In more fluid, changing societies we are more apt to find controls that are internalized—that do not depend to so great an extent on control and enforcement by external agents. However, regardless of the congruence between socialization practices and adult norms, any extreme pattern of training will produce stress for the individuals involved. The deviations that have been considered all deny in some way the domination of the individual by the social occasion in which he finds himself. From this, however, it should not be assumed that propriety in situations can be guaranteed by a complete investment of self in an occasioned main involvement. Whatever the prescribed main involvements, and whatever their society, that the individual is required to give visible evidence that he has not wholly given himself up to this main focus of attention. Some slight margin of self-command and self-possession will typically be required and exhibited. This is the case even though this obligation often must be balanced against the previously mentioned obligation to maintain a minimum of an acceptable main involvement. Ordinarily the individual can so successfully maintain an impression of due disinvolvement that we tend to overlook this complete absorption in a situated task, the crisis itself, as a new social occasion, may conceal, exonerate, and even oblige what would otherwise be a situational delict. During minor crises, however, when the individual has cause to withdraw from general orientation to the gathering but has no license to do so, we may witness wonderfully earnest attempts to demonstrate proper disinvolvement in spite of difficulties. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23

Thus, when a man fully invests himself in running to catch a bus, or finds himself slipping on an icy pavement, he may hold his body optimistically stiff and erect, wearing a painful little smile on his face, as if to say that he is really not much involved in his scramble and has remained in situationally appropriate possession of himself. There are, apparently, different kinds of overinvolvement in himself in cheering at an amateur boxing match or silently overimmerses himself in a chess problem. Again one sees how activities which differ so very much on the surface can have the same expressive significance. Interestingly enough, evidence of the quieter kind of overinvolvement often comes to us through a special class of fuguelike side involvements, these repetitive acts implying that the individual is very deeply involved in a task, often an occasioned one. Along with these fuguelike signs we are likely to find disarray of posture (and by implication some evidence of rules regarding posture). One of the early—and one of the few—students of ordinary social gatherings comments: “When a student in the class-room becomes really absorbed in the problem in hand, he is likely to slip down on his shoulder blades, spread his feet, ruffle his hair, and do any number of other unconventional deeds. Let the spell be broken, and he sits, rearranges his clothes, and again become socially proper. There seem to be few situations defined to allow such withdrawal into an activity. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23

Therefore, when an intensely involved individual is caught out in one of these dissociated side involvements, he typically reacts with embarrassment, hastily reallocating his involvement is firmly tied to the purpose of the occasion, are deep risk involvements likely to be tolerated. A very common form of involvement control occurs at mealtimes, where in many sections of Anglo-American society, the individual is expected to eat relatively slowly, not to take food from his neighbour’s plate, and in general to conduct himself as if getting his fill were not the most important thing in the World—as if, in fact, eating required very little attention itself. (In Shetland Isle, for example, a community in which most persons were always a little hungry, it was difficult to find an instance where an individual accepting a second helping of food did not first avow that he had had enough and next proclaim that he had been given too much.) In mental hospitals, staff pay tribute to these rulings by constructing social types to epitomize patients who flagrantly break them. There is, for example, the “stuffer,” who presses food into his mouth until his cheeks bulge and he turns red and grasps for want of air; there is also the “food grabber,” who, not being trusted to respect his neighbour’s plate, will either be served alone or tied to his chair during mealtime by means of a sash looped through his shirt collar, like a dogs on a leash, to keep him out of other people’s territory. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23

Other, less extreme instances found in the hospital form a bridge to behaviour found in free society. At Central Hospital, for example, it was characteristic of some of the “sicker” adult patients to eat their dessert first, thus suggesting too little control of their desire for sweets and too much involvement in eating. This, of course, is a delict often found in small children, who must be taught to conceal both “overeagerness” for oral indulgences and “oversatisfaction” while consuming them. Appetitive self-control and other involvement rulings are an important part of what parents must teach their children. One basis for the often-stated similarity between mental patients and children is that both groupings must be pressed into compliance with involvement rulings by those in charge. It can be claimed, then, that “regression” is not a return to an infantile state of libidinal organization but rather a manifestation of those problems of situational discipline that incidentally are found among children. In our society, one interesting sign that is taken as evidence of overinvolvement is perspiration; another is a “shaky” voice. More important than these is the phenomenon of shaky hands, a problem for senior citizens. Individuals with chronic tremors of this kind become “faulty persons,” burdening all ordinary interaction with a display of what can be take as insufficient control over the self. Certain strategies, perhaps independently hit upon, are employed to conceal this sign and to prevent it from giving the lie to the front of proper involvement maintained by the rest of the individual’s body. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23

One technique is for the individual to put his hands in his pockets’ another, to hold them fast on the table; a third, to hold one shaky hand with the other, while resting one elbow on the table for support. It may be suggested that the tendency to hold something of himself in reserve may so colour an individual’s activity that, in those special situations where relatively complete abandonment to a main involvement is required, he may find that he is unable to let himself go. Perhaps the incidence of middle-class frigidity can be understood partly in these terms. In any case, pleasures of the flesh in our society is preferably carried on under the involvement of shield darkness, for darkness can allow participants to enjoy some of the liberty of not being in a situation at all. This problem, but not this solution, is found, of course, in other settings. Thus, the sharing of an office with another often means a limit on work, because extreme concentration and immersion in a task will become an improper handling of oneself in the situation. Some co-workers apparently resolve the issue by gradually according each other the status of nonperson, this allowing a relaxation of situational properties and an increase in situated concentration. This may even be carried to the point where one individual allows himself half-audible “progress grunts” such as, “What do you know!” “Hm hm,” “Let us see,” without excusing himself to his co-worker. If an individual feels obliged to affect deep immersion in some focus of attention, he may of course affect these expressions. Other dissociated side involvements such as hair twisting may also be indulged in and tolerated in such circumstances. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23

Many professors have been killing science in the same way as priests are killing religion. None of the established sciences go far enough in exploring the other dimensions which surely exist; they stop at a blank wall. There is great importance of working upon one’s own development with, and through, a school or structured group environment. Man is a machine, moving through is existence in a dream-like, mechanistic state, and in order to tap his full potential he has to awake through a disciplined attempt to self-remember—to be able to become fully aware of oneself at anytime. Self-remembering is difficult, requiring a series of steps in definite order together with the help of a school; the eventual reward, through self-study, control, and the transformation of negative emotions, was the attainment of objective consciousness. This is an awakened state in which a human, released from one’s state of “waking sleep,” is capable of seeing the higher reality (“esoteric knowledge”) invisible to one in one’s ordinary, undeveloped level of being. They key in all of this, of course, is school work based on the principle that development of knowledge and growth of being must proceed together for right understanding. Unlike many other systems, this cannot be learned solely through a book. Words well put together on a page cannot convey a thought as ordinary speech can; on the other hand, a less-than-perfect written sentence could, by its very ambiguity, obscure more than it revealed. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23

Humans have occasional moments of self-consciousness, but they have no command over them. They come and go by themselves, being controlled by external circumstances and occasional associations or emotions. The question arises: is it possible to acquire command over these fleeting moments of consciousness, to evoke them more often and to keep them longer, or even make them permanent? Consciousness, not as it is defined by the medical sciences but as something else—is an awareness and perception of the World above and beyond our ordinary experience. In addition, throughout the so-called “legitimate science” there has been a renewed and serious study in those areas once labelled part of the Occult: extrasensory perception, psychic phenomena, additional dimensions, bio-feedback, telepathy, and other subjects once considered the province of witches and warlocks. It could be said that the entire everyday World is coming around to observation made over four hundred years ago in Hamlet: “There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.” There is a knowledge which surpasses all ordinary human knowledge and is inaccessible to ordinary people but which exists somewhere and belongs to somebody. Do not accept any ideas that cannot be prove in practice. What is necessary is the willingness to accept one’s own mechanicalness and lack of unifying consciousness, and to summon the will to self-remember in order to overcome the one and acquire the other. The aim of this system is to bring man to conscience. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23

In reality, we remember very little of our lives, and that is because we remember only conscious moments. Consciousness is not merely the opposite of sleep, or unconsciousness; it is an awareness of self, a self-remembering. The chief feature of our being is that we are many, not one. Because man is not fully aware of himself, he is also not aware of many contradictory desires, beliefs, emotions, and prejudices which sway him from one moment to the next; her has no center of gravity, and, lacking that, is incapable of sustaining a fixed goal for any length of time. Although he may believe he is determining his own life’s direction, a man is actually buffered from one desire to another by an assortment of outside influences. Man can overcome this state only be becoming aware of his multiple selves and by seeking to develop his true self by stopping the expression of negative emotions, identification, lying, and other elements of “false personality.” Man has no will, only self-will (“wanting to have our own way”) and willfulness (“wanting to do something simply because we should not”). Both grow out of the momentary passing desires of the man “I’s,” or selves, of which man consists. True will is present only in conscious man and is a goal to be obtained through the system; we gain will by exercising in work through the system, in a school situation. Self-will and willfulness are particularly difficult to obliterate because they are part of our illusion that we are already conscious and able to “do”—that is, accomplish something by original intent rather thanas a mechanistic, reflex response to outside influences. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23

Negative emotions are all emotions of violence or depression. Such emotions are useless and destructive, and despite our protests to the contrary they arise not from outside provocations but from within ourselves. However, negative emotions are artificial—arising out of identification (our incapability of separating ourselves from the objects, people, or emotions around us)—and hence can be destroyed once we become aware of them and attempt to suppress them through self-remembering. The first step in eliminating negative emotions is to limit their expression; when this happens, it will then become possible to get at the root of negative emotions themselves. Think very seriously before you decide to work on yourself with the idea of changing yourself…this work admits of no compromise and it requires a great amount of self-discipline and readiness to obey all rules. Very few people actually realize just how much emphasis people place on appearance. One does not have to be flashy to get visual attention either. Despite the sound of your voice, your scent or the texture of your skin, your appearance must command attention. If you are unusual looking and act like you do not really think so, trying to look as much like the others as possible, they will still talk behind your back, but a little more cruelly. When you are in their presence their guilt at having done so, combined with the fear of weakening your apparent self-confidence, will cause them to be extremely patronizing. Neither of these patterns really gains you respect but only sympathy. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23

Respect based on accomplishment can only be given by those who are humble, wise, and themselves worthy of respect. From those who have achieved little or nothing and are ego-starved and insecure, respect can only be gained through fear. Through accomplishment, you will gain respect from those who are just. With your awesomeness, you will gain respect from those who are unenlightened. If you are truly beyond the help of glamorizing techniques, take the Devil’s name and play the Devil’s game and let people know it. Learn a skill. Paint, play, sculpt, write, draw, read—so that those who matter will respect you because you are unusual, wise and capable. Let your status be known. Do everything in accordance with your type. You will then be perfect. You will be outrageous, because everything about you will fit, despite your homeliness; and with your hint of secret powers, the small-minded will fear you, and well they should, for you follow this advice, you will have those powers. The kind of people you attract will depend on the kind of theatre you are working! Remember that attractiveness is a universal appeal and is not limited to a certain economic or cultural level. If you utilize certain tricks that will create compulsion in enough people, you will soon be able to see the right face in the crowd, and the old adage, “Them that has, gets,” will take on new meaning. A most devastating stigma that can confront any person is the fear of being “phoney.” If you are afraid of being considered phoney, you will surely fail. No matter what you do appear otherwise, if you succeed in anything, there will always be the charge of phoneyness leveled against you by those who either cannot stand your success, do not have the guts to do what you are doing or wish they had thought of it first! #RandolphHarris 10 of 23

If you remain in the bounds of public propriety (and most outrageous tactics are!), perform your tasks or responsibilities in an efficient manner and are civil and courteous, you would be surprised at the things you can get away with in your appearance. Everyone who was ever a guest of William Randolph Hearst was astonished at the range and diversity of his knowledge. Whether his visitor was a cowboy or a Rough Rider, a New York politician or a diplomat, William Randolph Hearst knew what to say. And how was it done? Whenever Hearst expected a visitor, he sat up late the night before, reading up on the subject in which he knew his guest was particularly interested. For Hearst knew, all leaders know, that the royal road to a person’s heart is to talk about the things one treasures most. If you want to get to know a person, find out what interests them—what catches their enthusiasm. You can ask around about a person, or get to know things they said in the past, you can even interview a person, but you will not get to know them until you interact with them. And the best way to do that is to find out what they are interested in and let that be catalyst that builds the friendship. For instance, you may find discover someone belongs to a society of hotel executives called the Hotel Greeters of America. And perhaps their bubbling enthusiasm has made that individual president of the organization, and president of the International Greeters. No matter where its conventions are here, is there. If you talk to him about his interests, he will be willing to open up and express his hobby with vibrant enthusiasm. You may discover that one’s hobby is the passion of one’s life. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23

So, instead of getting to know a person by asking them what kind of music they like or whatever, find out what their hobby is before you meet them and then talk to them about it. Talking in terms of the other person’s interests pays off for both parties. The reward you get from this will be an enlargement of your life each time you speak to someone. Talk in terms of the other person’s interests. One of the simplest mechanisms that can modify interaction patterns arises from one agent’s staying near another. The most basic examples of this mechanism involve staying nearby in a physical space. The general character of the mechanism persists even when the proximity is conceptual rather than physical. The biological prototype of this mechanism is adhesion, in which one organism stick to another or stays close to it. It is seen all over the biological World, from a virus that sticks to cell surfaces, to a flea that visits the Human World in the company of a rodent, to a baby kangaroo that travels with its mother by staying in her pouch. The effect is that the “following” agent experiences a patten of interactions similar to that of the “leading” agent. In addition, there is also more interaction between the follower and the leader. In daily life we spend time with out relatives, co-workers, and friends, and by “sticking with them,” we also meet the people they know. There are many follow-the-leader mechanisms beyond these simplest ones. For example, there is apprenticeship, in which the apprentice stays close to, and shares many experiences of, the master of some trade. Beyond formal apprenticeship, there are still other forms of what has been called “legitimate peripheral participation. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23

These arrangements not only let the trainee see how an expert individual works but also allow access to social interactions that are essential to the effectiveness of the leading agent. Other instances of modifying interaction by staying close to another agent include: hospital rounds; “big brother” relationships—either with real siblings or deliberately arranged mentors; following a guide around a tourist site or other new place; research training; going to work with a parent; or attending the school of a widely known teacher who has attracted other students with the same interests. All of these familiar procedures of the social World, and many more, share an element of acquiring the interaction patterns as well as the strategies of a leading agent, who serves a kind of template. In the World of computer networks, this kind of mechanisms has been generalized. “Recommender” systems allow users to “adhere” to the tastes of others, in order to interact with the persons and objects they have encountered. In such systems, the user provides some profile of interest, say by rating a sample of films. Then the system tells the user about films that were liked by other raters whose patten of evaluation is similar to the user’s own. Comparable methods have been constructed for finding other “taste goods,” such as books and music, for finding professional assistance (dentists, stockbrokers), and for finding online discussion groups or World Wide web pages of interest. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23

In fact, most people on social media are marketing or advertising and only a small few respond to messages. It has become like an unorganized confusion of information. America Online (AOL) used to have chat rooms were people actually communicated and could send private message, in addition to public messages in a chat room. That for of social media might be conducive to make social media more about socializing. It gets kind of boring just look at people’s pictures and videos and not actually having discussions with people who have an interest similar to yours. These electronic versions imitate the wisdom of the now faded time when library books had signed checkout cards and it was possible to see who had previously read a book. In the contemporary on-line versions, however, you may not need to recognize the names of the others. Indeed, the Information Revolution makes possible recommendations based on statistical synthesis of others that might be closer to predicting your tastes than any other single users, or even a professional critic. Such systems are often able to help users find other agents or objects they will enjoy. These mechanisms for following an agent present an intricate mix of advantages and disadvantages. Among the sources of benefits and problems, we focus on two. The first is the ability to acquire interaction patterns implicitly without having a good theory of how things work. The second is living in the kind of clustered social network that results from wide use of the mechanism, a network where many of the other agents have strongly overlapping knowledge and social contacts. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23

Using mechanisms for following, an agent can tacitly pick up the contact patterns of a leading agent without necessarily understanding the causes or the effects of that pattern. Although there are problems that we return to below, not having to understand the situation can be an important advantage. Indeed, most of the accomplishments of biological evolution, and much human social change, have occurred without the benefit of such explicit knowledge, let alone theoretical understanding. Nature can make a quite efficient food web without the science of ecology. Of course, theories are powerful when we can achieve them. (With scientific understanding, we could have foreseen the consequences of actions like introducing rabbits to Australia, where natural predators were absent.) However, good theories are extraordinarily costly to create and share with others. For many complex domains, they may long remain beyond our capabilities. In addition to three basic strategic moves, there are more complicated options. Instead of establishing a response rule directly, you can purposefully allow someone else to take advantage of one of these strategies. Three options are: You may allow someone to make an unconditional move before you respond. You may wait for a threat before taking any action. You may wait for a promise before taking any action. We have already seen examples in which someone who could move first does even better by relinquishing this option, allowing the other side to make an unconditional move. This is trye whenever t is better to follow than to lead, as in the tales of the America’s Cup race and gambling at the Cambridge May Ball. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23

While it can be advantageous to give up the initiative, this is not a general rule. Sometimes your goal will be to prevent your opponent from making an unconditional commitment. When you surround an enemy, leave an outlet free. One leaves an outlet free so that the enemy may believe there is a road to safety. If the enemy does not see an escape outlet, he or she will fight with the courage of desperation. Deny the enemy an opportunity to make his or her own very credible commitment of fighting to the death. It is never advantageous to allow others to threaten you. You could always do what they wanted you to do without the threat. The fact that they can make you worse off if you do not cooperate cannot help, because it limits your available options. However, this maxim applies only to allowing threats alone. If the other side can make both promises and threats, then you can both be better off. When the body’s working, building, and battling go awry, we turn to medicine for diagnosis and treatment. Today’s methods, though, have obvious shortcomings. Diagnostic procedures vary widely, from asking a patient questions, through looking at X-ray shadows, through exploratory surgery and the microscopic and chemical analysis of materials from the body. Doctors can diagnose many ills, but others remain mysteries. Even a diagnosis does not imply understanding: doctors could diagnose many syndromes with unknown cases. After years of experimentation and untold loss of life, they can even treat what they do not understand—a drug may help, though no one knows why. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23

Leaving aside such therapies as heating, massaging, irradiating, and so forth, the two main forms of treatment are surgery and drugs. From a molecular perspective neither is sophisticated. Surgery is a direct, manual approach to fixing the body, now practiced by highly trained specialists. Surgeons sew together torn tissues and skin to enable healing, cut out cancer, clear out clogged arteries, and even install pacemakers and replacement organs. It is direct, but it can be dangerous: anesthetics, infections, organ rejection, and missed cancer cells can all cause failure. Surgeons lack fine-scale control. The body works by means of molecular machines, most working inside cells. Surgeons can see neither molecules nor cells, and can repair neither. Drug therapies affect the body at the molecular level. Some therapies—like insulin for diabetics—provide materials the body lacks. Most—like antibiotics for infections—introduce materials no human body produces. A drug consists of small molecules; in our simulated molecular World, many would fit in the palm of your hand. These molecules are dumped into the body (sometimes directed to a particular region by a needle or the like), where they mix and wander through blood and tissue. They typically bump into other molecules of all sorts in all places, but only stick to and affect molecules of certain kinds. Antibiotics like penicillin are selective poisons. They stick to molecular machines in bacteria and jam them, thus fighting infection. Viruses are a harder case because they are simpler and have fewer vulnerable molecular machines. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23

Worms, fungi, and protozoa are also difficult, because their molecular machines are more like those found in the human body, and hence harder to jam selectively. Cancer is the most difficult of all. Cancerous growths consist of human cells, and attempts to poison the cancer cells typically poison the rest of the patient as well. Other drug molecules bind to molecules in the human body and modify their behavior. Some decrease the secretion of stomach acid, other stimulate the kidneys, many affect the molecular dynamics of the brain. Designing drug molecules to bind to specific targets is a growth industry today, and provides one of the many short-term payoffs that is spurring development in molecular engineering. Current medicine is limited both by its understanding and by its tools. In many ways, it is till more an art than a science. In some areas, medicine has become much more scientific, and in others not much at all. We are still short of what I would consider a reasonable scientific level. Many people do not realize that we just do not know fundamentally how things work. It is like having a BMW, and hoping that by taking things apart, we will understand something of how they operate. We know that there is an engine in the front and we know it is under the hood, we have an idea that it is big and heavy, but we do not really see the rings that allow the pistons to slide in the block. We do not even understand that controlled explosions are responsible for providing the energy that drives the machine. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23

Better tools could provide both better knowledge and better ways to apply that knowledge for healing. Today’s surgery can rearrange blood vessels, but is far too coarse to rearrange or repair cells. Today’s drug therapies can target some specific molecules, but only some, and only on the basis of type. Doctors today cannot affect molecules in one cell while leaving identical molecules in a neighbouring cell untouched because medicine today cannot apply surgical control to the molecular level. Now for even better news. We have not run out of energy sources. Energy can be harvested from innumerable sources, including some that at first glance seem outlandish—as the steam engine did in its early days. Clunky and no doubt expensive by the standards of time, it was designed to increase energy supply by helping to pump water out of coal mines Craig Venter, the man who led the successful private effort to decode the human genome, is working toward the creation of artificial organisms that can clean up pollution—and create energy. “Biology,” he says, “can change our dependency on fossil fuels.” He is not alone. Stanford professors and graduate students are also pursuing the biological production of hydrogen from genetically engineered bacteria. Entrepreneur Howard Berke’s team is working to develop a material as thin as plastic wrap to directly convert sunlight into electricity capable of recharging cell phones, GPS, and other devices. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23

Others are taking advantage of waves and tides to pull energy out of the oceans. The La Rance tidal-power station in France turns out 240 megawatts of power. Other tidal systems are used in Norway, Canada, Russian, and China. In addition, every day the sun transfers the thermal-energy equivalent of 250 billion barrels of oil to the oceans, and we already have technologies that can convert it to electricity. Farther out in both time and space is another potentially huge source of energy—the moon. It turns out that the moon is rich in helium 3—and helium-3, if combined with the hydrogen isotope deuterium, can tun out awesome amounts of energy. Indeed, just 25 tonnes of helium, which can be transported on a space shuttle, is enough to provide electricity for the U.S.A. for one full year. The moon contains ten times more energy in the form of helium-3 than all the fossil fuels on the Earth. Add to these a long list of other potential sources, and it becomes clear that there is no absolute shortage of energy available to the human race. What we need are new, creative ways to access that supply. And today there are more scientists, engineers, inventors and sources of finance and venture capital than any time in history. We are also likely to see the de-massification process at work as the World energy system assumes a new structure more compatible with the needs of advanced knowledge-based economies. This suggests a multiplication of energy sources so that the system is no longer overwhelmingly dependent on coal, oil, and gas. It means more different sources and more different technologies matched by more different players and producers—including prosumers who, with their fuel cells or wind towers or other personal technologies, will increasing meet their own power needs. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23

The central question, then is not whether we will overcome the energy disaster heading towards us but how soon. And that will depend in good measure on the outcome of wave conflict between vested interests still benefitting from our industrial-era energy systems and the pioneers researching, designing, and fighting for breakthrough alternatives. Faced with this battle, we should not let the pessimists’ warnings narrow our views of the possible. It helps to remember an earlier crisis that also involved energy—in this case nuclear. In August 1945, the entire World shook when two atomic bombs—the worst weapons ever seen—were dropped on Japan, bringing World War II to a fiery end. These weapons of mass destruction perfectly paralleled the mass production of the industrial age. Yet, miraculously, for the next half century no atomic weapon has been exploded in combat anywhere. Today we worry about nuclear proliferation and fear that terrorists may acquire one or more of these bombs. These are realistic worries. However, the danger does not even approach that which existed when the United States of America and the Soviet Union aimed literally thousands of missiles with atomic warheads at each other with triggers set to go off instantly. Still, I bet the state of the World in 2023 makes a lot of people want to start building basements and stock piling food and water. Speaking of food, not long ago Wendy’s International, whose 3,700 fast-food restaurants stretch from the United States of America to Japan to Greece and Guam, introduced an “Express Pak” order for drive-in customers. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23

The Express Pak consisted of a hamburger, French fries, and a Coke. However, the customer had to order only the words Express Pak instead of specifying each item separately. The idea was to accelerate the service. In the words of one Wendy’s spokesperson, “We may be taking three seconds. But the cumulative effect can be significant.” This seemingly trivial business innovation tells us a lot about the future of power. For the speed with which we exchange information—even seemingly insignificant information—is related to the rise of a complex new system for wealth creation. And that lies behind the most important power shifts in our time. In itself, course, how quickly Wendy’s sells hamburgers is not exactly a matter of earth-shaking significance. However, one of the most important things to know about any system, and particularly any economic system, is its “clock-time,” the speed with which it operates. Every system—from the human body’s circulatory system to the society’s wealth creation system—can operate only at certain speeds. Too slow and it breaks down; too fast and it flies apart. All systems consist of subsystems, which likewise function only within a certain speed range. The “pace” of the whole system can be thought of as the average of the rates of change in its various parts. Each national economy and each system of wealth creation operates at its own characteristic pace. Each has, as it were, a unique metabolic rate. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23

We can measure the speed of a wealth-making system in many ways: in terms of machine processes, business transactions, communication flows, the speed with which laboratory knowledge is translated into commercial products, or the length of time needed to make certain decisions, lead times for delivery, and so on. When we compare the overall pace of First Wave or agrarian systems of wealth creation with that of Second Wave or industrial systems, it becomes clear that smokestack economics run faster than traditional agricultural economies. Wherever the industrial revolution passed, it shifted economic processes into a higher gear. By the same token, the new system of wealth creation described in these pages operates at speeds unimaginable even a generation or two ago. Today’s economic metabolism would have broken the system in an earlier day. A new “heteojunction” microchip that switches on and off in two trillions of a second symbolized the new pace. The acceleration of change will transform society, and cause it to exceed their adaptive capabilities. Acceleration itself has effects independent of nature of the change involved. Hidden within this finding is an economic insight that goes beyond the old “time is money” cliché. The acceleration effect, indeed, implies a powerful new law of economics. This law can be stated simply: When the pace of economic activity speeds up, each unit of time comes to be worth more money. This powerful law, as we shall see, hold profound implications not just for individual businesses, but for whole economies and for global relations among economies. It has a special meaning for the relations between the World’s rich and poor. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23

Cresleigh Homes

Though the exterior is gorgeous, you won’t believe what’s waiting for you inside. 😍 Our Residence 2 model at #MillsStation features Universal Design! This innovative approach to home construction ensures that no matter your family’s stage, you can enjoy life.

From lowered light switches to zero-threshold showers to wider hallways, our homes boast creative solutions to needs of all ability levels. Find out more on our website! https://cresleigh.com/mills-station/residence-2/

#CresleighHomes
#CresleighRanch